Automated Testing. How to Maintain Sanity as Complexity Grows

Monday, 28 January 2013 11:21

Ponder

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We’ve been heads down porting the code from our original prototype from C++11 to Lua. Pushing more of the core engine to Lua will make the final game much more moddable than the track we were on before, so I’m super happy with the change, even if it was time consuming.

How’s that working out?

This is the first major project I’ve done with Lua and I’m really enjoying it. I can turn the edit-test-debug loop much faster when I don’t have to wait for a recompile. That’s great, but many of the bugs I end up fixing are things which could be easily caught by a static-type checking compiler. Lua 5.1 with some tools to help here (like strict.lua), but we definitely need some extra tools of our own.

Introducing Desktop Tuesdays. First Up, Farmer Assets!

Tuesday, 22 January 2013 09:00

radiant

1 Comment

In the spirit of keeping the blog updated, I’m going to try a little experiment here, taking a screenshot of whatever I’m working on and posting it on Tuesdays. Hence, welcome to the first Desktop Tuesday update!

What you’re looking at are a bunch of models for our farmer profession. This is all a work in progress of course. I’m happy with some of the things in there, but most still needs a little more work. The veggies in particular are a little too bright and saturated right now.

When doing this models, I try to define the forms through well-defined front and side views, only rounding off corners where it’s absolutely necessary. I’ve found that when the model gets too “jaggy” the shading of each individual voxel breaks up the old-school 16-bit RPG look we’re going for. You can see this in the farmer’s hat, which is sort of a mess compared to the clean, easy-to-read forms in the well or the wooden buckets.

That’s it for now. See you next Tuesday!

New Year, New Blog!

Wednesday, 09 January 2013 17:30

radiant

1 Comment

Hope you enjoyed the holidays. It’s been a while since we’ve updated the site, but I assure you we’ve been pretty busy here behind the scenes. We (and when I say “we” I mean Tony) have spent the last month or so laying down some of the last big cornerstones of the engine. Our New Year’s resolution is to keep this page up to date more often, starting with a quick redesign that’s hopefully a little easier on the eyes.